FOOD, TIMBER
Worth: $2.75 billion
GRAEME HART'S smile has hardly left the business pages all year - not surprising, given the deals he has pulled.
One of the reasons he has been so prominent is that he has had something to sell - the Goodman Fielder float saw the entrepreneur call a rare press conference, giving photographers and television crews the chance to update their files.
Alas, no sooner had his food company Burns Philp sold off Goodman Fielder than Hart was back into recluse mode, refusing interviews, including one for the Rich List. "Graeme doesn't give interviews," a spokeswoman for Hart's investment company Rank Group said. Well, not unless he has good reason to.
Hart might be media shy but he can't stay out of the news. Around the middle of last year some investment bankers were wondering whether the high levels of corporate activity seen in the first half might be over.
There were fewer deals happening and the enthusiasm for buy-outs, mergers and equity raisings appeared to have abated And then Hart came along.
In less than two months, the Kiwi entrepreneur struck three major deals to turn the local corporate environment on its head.
First, his private company Rank Group sold most of the New Zealand Dairy Foods assets back to Fonterra for three times the purchase price, taking in return assets worth $416 million and $338 million in cash. The assets were part of a package later sold to Goodman Fielder for $746 million.
Then he caught the investment banking community on the hop, buying International Paper's controlling stake in Carter Holt Harvey and offering to buy out the remaining shareholders in a deal worth $3.3 billion.
As if that wasn't enough, Hart further stunned the investment community by announcing his food group Burns Philp would buy Dairy Foods from Rank and revive the Goodman Fielder name in a combined sharemarket float worth more than $2 billion.
The Goodman Fielder float and a subsequent sale of Uncle Tobys left Hart's Burns Philp with a war chest of $3.5 billion. If Hart was comfortable making a heavily leveraged buy - as he has been in the past - Burns Philp could make a purchase worth up to $A6 billion, a Credit Suisse report estimated earlier this year.
Others estimate an even bigger plunge - stockbroker ABN Amro noted Burns Philp could afford an acquisition of $15 billion. High profile companies such as Lion Nathan and Telecom New Zealand are among the speculated targets but Hart always keeps his cards close to his chest.
There is also the question of what plans he has for Carter Holt, now the company is delisted from the stock exchange, giving Hart greater freedom to restructure and sell parts of the company. Most of the short term speculation centres on a sale of Carter Holt's 330,000ha of forests, believed to be worth up to $1.37 billion.
But Hart is far from conventional, eschewing business associations or business gatherings so any information is hard to come by.
While he obviously loves transforming companies, Hart's other passions revolve around his family, his home and his boat - a $100 million yacht, Ulysses.
2005: $2 billion
